A full-service literary agency that focuses on books for the Christian market.
Author Dies While Reading Edited Manuscript
Such a headline might well echo the feelings an author experiences when, much to his horror, he discovers his editor has–ahem–done some pretty creative work on the manuscript sent into the publishing house. (An …
Each January each year, I ponder which books I read the year before that were the most rewarding, stayed with me the longest (not in a bad way, like indigestion), and were the most exquisitely written. Below are my favorite …
With the entrance of 2021, Books & Such is adding a gem of a new literary agent to our roster, Mary DeMuth. Mary has been a part of the Christian publishing industry for decades, having written 40 books, both fiction …
I wrote this blog post for New Year’s 2009 (you know, during the economic recession). As I pondered leaving behind 2020 (thank, God!) and looking through the dark hours of the pandemic, I realized my 2009 meanderings are just as …
This year I find myself realizing that not having a large family Christmas gathering leaves plenty of space to think about what we’re really celebrating at Christmas. To slow my heart to a more tempered pace this 2020 Christmas, I’m …
Some publishers have chosen to downsize the number of in-house editors but instead to rely on freelancers. That decision raises the question, What does an in-house editor do for you?
Having been such an editor, I have personal insights into …
When most of the nation went into lock-down late in March, people explored all sorts of pursuits they had neither the time nor the inclination for until then. That all seems like a dream now, but last week I noted …
Once you’ve created the best query you can (a la my most recent blog post) and have your proposal ready to submit, you’re mind will turn toward finding an agent. Let’s be clear about one thing: You don’t want …
The first thing to do in writing a query is to…not write the query yet. Give it some incubation time.
Rather than jumping into your query, take your time to force yourself to define–really define–the project.
For the first, oh, decade or so of my writing career, I thought my writing was pretty good. So I didn’t understand why magazine editors found it necessary to take my perfectly serviceable sentences and render them “less interesting.” That …
